Blackstone Announces Minority Growth Investment in Salas O’Brien

NEW YORK & IRVINE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Blackstone (NYSE: BX) and Salas O’Brien (the “Company”), a leading employee-owned engineering and technical services firm, announced today a partnership where funds managed by Blackstone have made a strategic minority growth investment to help accelerate the Company’s continued expansion within the fast-growing architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) market. Salas O’Brien will continue to be majority owned by its team members.

“Salas O’Brien is thrilled to partner with Blackstone as we continue our journey of growth,” said Darin Anderson, Chairman and CEO of Salas O’Brien. “As more companies and institutions pursue their decarbonization, energy transition, and critical infrastructure goals, Salas O’Brien’s expertise has never been more needed in the world. Blackstone’s investment helps us gain greater access to talent, enhances our technology resources, and helps us better serve more clients. The fact that we can do all of this while retaining our employee ownership approach and in partnership with the incredible professionals at Blackstone is an amazing validation of our team’s hard work—and positions us to get even better.”

Shary Moalemzadeh, Senior Managing Director at Blackstone, and Evan Middleton, Managing Director at Blackstone, said: “We are excited to partner with the world-class team at Salas O’Brien as they continue their growth by leveraging Blackstone’s global scale, resources, and operational expertise to better serve the Company’s customers. The current market environment has clearly demonstrated the critical need for resilient, differentiated, high-quality AEC solutions, and we look forward to helping accelerate the growth of this exceptional leader in this sector.”

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Guggenheim Securities served as exclusive financial advisor and Latham & Watkins served as legal counsel to Salas O’Brien. Chartwell Financial Advisory served as financial advisor and Kirkland & Ellis LLP served as a legal advisor to Blackstone.

About Blackstone

Blackstone is the world’s largest alternative asset manager. We seek to create positive economic impact and long-term value for our investors. We do this by relying on extraordinary people and flexible capital to help strengthen the companies we invest in. Our over $1 trillion in assets under management include investment vehicles focused on private equity, real estate, public debt and equity, infrastructure, life sciences, growth equity, opportunistic, non-investment grade credit, real assets and secondary funds, all on a global basis. Further information is available at www.blackstone.com. Follow @blackstone on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

About Salas O’Brien

Founded in 1975, Salas O’Brien is an employee-owned engineering and technical services firm focused on advancing the human experience through the built environment. Our team is engineered for impact™, helping clients achieve critical goals, advancing our team members through growth and opportunity, and operating at the center of important global issues, including sustainability and decarbonization. We are a top firm as ranked by Engineering News-Record and Consulting-Specifying Engineer, and we have appeared for the past eleven years on the Inc. 5000 list of North America’s fastest-growing private companies.